I’m thinking about the butterflies because I saw one recently. Some background before I begin. The mobs had been dying out, or at least publicly dying. Maybe they were going into hibernation or they’ve been consumed by the system and have become one and the same with it, I don’t know. Not my business. But what is my business is lock picking. I’m small time, I know that much. I have a record with the ISSP, sure. And maybe there’s a bounty on my head for, like, 2,000 woolongs. And I do a good job at picking those locks. But I don’t have a history of being hired for, say, breaking into banks or stealing from the houses of billionaires. But with the end of the mob, some friends of mine got to thinking: why don’t we steal from the big guys? It’s not like they would call the cops on us or anything. To defend myself in retrospect, we were a bit drunk and too stupid to realize the blatantly obvious.
I don’t know if it was John or Bob who suggested the idea. John Jacobson was a lean guy from Venus who had one of his eyes cut out. Sometimes, he’d claim that he had a cybernetic eye underneath, but I knew damn well that it was just a gaping hole. (Don’t ask how I know that, though I will assure you the lady who saw it with me is doing fine at the convent.) John mostly did enforcement, which usually meant breaking a working Joe’s legs when he decided to form a union. (I often ask myself why I was friends with the guy, and the cane he held in his left hand for no reason other than aesthetics usually gave me my answer.) Bob Blake was often the quieter of the five of us. The only one of us from Earth, he would come up with a clever scheme that ended poorly for everyone other than him. Sometimes, the dominos would hit him as well, though he found a way to bounce back. He would call me shorty for some reason. I mean, I was shorter than him, but only by like an inch. Bob was in surveillance. Mostly spying on suspected rats like Steve.
Steve was initially hesitant to steal the stuff. He was Mars born like me, but he was a few years younger and had his left ear slightly cut near the bottom. Aside from being a rat, Steve Michaels the Fourth had a nervous disposition about himself. He walked everywhere like it was covered in nails. I wanted to ask him if he was nervous because he was a rat in a room full of cats or if he was always nervous. Despite being a rat, he was a good guy. I’ll admit that much. Didn’t deserve what happened to him. Deserved some other things, maybe a beating or two. But not that. I can’t think of anyone who deserves that. If I knew what was going to happen, I’d be nervous too. Regardless, Gina was able to calm him down. Gina Lubitsch was a waitress at the bar we were drinking at. Which meant she could probably kick all of our asses, even if we were sober. She had been listening to the conversation and thought the plan, though blatantly concocted by drunks, had some merit. Not much, but it could be cultivated into something more. She told us to come see her when we sobered up.
The next day, we all showed up at her apartment. It was barely big enough to house one person, let alone five. (Grant ended up dying that night for, frankly, banal reasons I don’t want to get into here.) But we could all see her board. It was clear to me that she had been planning this out for longer than a night. The two remaining mobs had three mansions each. We didn’t plan on hitting all six, we weren’t greedy or nothing. One would be enough. Gina had scouted out the one we would go to: Don Jacobs’ mansion. Now, Don Jacobs was many things. Reclusive to the point where we didn’t know what he looked like. Rich. Probably going to Hell. But nice fellow was not one of them. Out of the two mobs, his gang was probably the more repulsive. Sure, we were a part of it, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. John would tell blatantly false stories about how he was friends with Don (again, we were all small fry), but he’d make them out of news reports we all knew were talking about Don.
One of his tall tales involved going to a bowling alley at five am, cause you don’t say no to Don Jacobs. You just don’t. The owner of the alley tried to explain to Don that the place was closed. But Don had 35,000 reasons to explain why it was open. The owner sees the logic in this, and opens the place. Don walks in with John, heads towards the bowling balls, picks out the heaviest one he can find, and bashes the owner’s head in. I mean, there was barely any head left when Don was done. He then proceeds to bowl a perfect game. All Xs all the way. It’s true, the computer in the news report said so.
So naturally, it’s John who asks rather smugly, “Are we seriously going to steal from Don Jacobs? The man’s a fucking psychopath.”
Gina then retorts, “Yeah, but your “friend” is in the hospital, probably not long for this world.” Indeed, she was right. Don Jacobs died the night we broke into his mansion. What we all knew at the time was he’d been running things from the hospital. But the people who were around at the compound were hired goons and maybe his younger brother James. But that bastard was crap at everything and barely paid the goons to guard him. They only worked for James Jacobs because his brother scared the crap out of them. The second he died, they’d turn on him like cancer turns on the human body. He’d deserve it too. Plus, the mansion was in the middle of nowhere, so the cops Don Jacobs owned would be too far away to do a damn thing. “Should be easy to steal from the place with him gone.”
The plan was simple. Steve and Gina would act as a distraction to lure out the guards while Bob and John stole his keycard. I would then use the card to get us all into the mansion, use my skills to break into the locked rooms and safes, and we’d take whatever we could carry. I’m cutting a lot out of the plan because there were a lot of details that I don’t fully remember. It was twelve years ago that it happened. I remember most, but not all of it. I can still picture Gina’s blood drenched face, still hear Steve scream as he was dying, still remember how I felt when…
I’m getting ahead of myself. We break in all to plan. John, fucker that he was, decides that the distraction isn’t working (despite it clearly working), so he up and kills the guard. So now we have to hide the body. He was an asshole, big fucking asshole. I assumed, if he decided to be an asshole on us, he’d just break someone’s legs or try to take a bigger cut. Killing didn’t fit within what I knew his MO to be. But then, I didn’t really know the guy. Hindsight’s a bitch.
It took us an entire hour just to hide the body. Gina’s furious and about to turn back. We all were. But John, John convinces us to keep going. I mean, he gave it his all. I think Steve was crying at the end. Or maybe I was. Again, memory’s a bit shot. I wasn’t much of a crier back then, but it could have been me. Anyways, we break in to find no one there. It was as if that one guard was the only person there. The house is completely empty. The lights were off and it felt haunted. The floorboards creaked loudly, such that even on our toes, we would be caught. But no one came. There was an open window that allowed bone chilling wind to sway its way in with the ease of a ghost through walls. It was almost supernaturally silent.
We tried to turn the lights on, but the only source of light we had was the full moon. We kept going into the bowels of the mansion. It was old, designed to look like a theme park’s imagining of what an old mansion looked like. The styles of architecture and design clashed in a gothic, miserable perfection. John was leading us deep into this place, this horrible, beautiful place. Gina was with Bob. He held her tighter than he realized. She didn’t mind. She was too preoccupied with fury. I could see it all from how she moved. This wasn’t her plan. This wasn’t where we were meant to be heading. What was John doing? Steve was behind me. I could hear the chatter of the doomed man’s teeth. I felt like crying. I wanted to go home and away from this awful place. I kept it in, as all men did back then.
Eventually, we came across noise. It was an old record player, the kind you only see in horror movies. The music was distorted and confused. The track, already an atonal instrumental designed to break the ears of its listeners, was warped into something far more unlistenable. John could see that we wanted to turn back. So he put his hand in his jacket pocket and made it clear that we were staying to the end of this tragic affair. He motioned with his pocketed hand for me to unlock the door where the music was coming from. He had a face only a mother could hate, yet I was growing to hate that face as well. We all were. It took me five minutes to get into the room. I’m good at what I do, and what I do takes time. I had hoped it would be enough time for one of the others to tackle John. I was wrong.
In the room, there were two things of note. The first was a flayed man I recognized to be James Jacobs from the tattoo on the skin that was lying before him. It was positioned and stuffed on the ground like a bearskin rug. His face was shaped into a smile from clay that was once screaming. Instead of eyeballs, the rug was stapled closed. One couldn’t mistake the rug for being a sleeping man. Especially as the flayed man, clearly dead, was displayed beside it with his legs twisted into a knot and his hands nailed to the wall. The second thing of note was a set of marbles. They weren’t actually marbles, but I didn’t know that at the time.
“Why are you doing this Don,” Bob asked. He was always three steps ahead of everyone else. That’s what made him a good spy, I suppose. Gina and I were shocked. Steve, however, stopped being nervous. His eyes widened in understanding. Guess he was two steps of me. “I was always a good soldier. Loyal to Lucifer. But why now? Hell, why us? Sure, Steve’s a rat, but Gina and Ryan are good people. Why us? Why do you want us dead?”
Don smiled the way a tiger smiles at a lamb. He then told us a story. It wasn’t that good of a story or even a true one. It was just a series of digressions that looked like a story, if you squinted hard enough. I don’t think I got the point of what he was talking about. I was too distracted by a butterfly that wasn’t there. It was hovering over the marbles. It made me see them. I looked back at Don and noticed he was looking at the marbles too. He was focused on them the way a thief is on his loot. Steve started to laugh. Our gaze all turned towards him. He was standing straight and stiff, like he was born with a metal rod for a spine. But he was also content, as if the world finally made some horrifying sense to him.
“I’m sorry John,” he said with a laugh, “but you’re always so goddamn longwinded with your stories. I mean, you just go on and on and on about how deadly and terrifying you are and how much you hate us for not being you and how you love to infiltrate people and blah, blah, blah! But come on. At this point, I think it’s an act. Sure, you kill people, but in such a camp way as to make it sound like you’re some monster when, in fact, you’re just a sad little man.” He went on like this for about an hour. We didn’t know what he was doing. In retrospect, I should have realized he wanted us to go at Don while he was too busy fuming at Steve’s words. I’m surprised he let the guy go for as long as he did. I suppose he respected the showmanship.
But when Steve was done, Don smacked him with his cane so hard it broke. The he grabbed Steve by the neck, practically lifting him off the ground, and shoved one of the marbles into his mangled throat. He then made us watch as Steve died. It was not a painless death. Every time, I try to go into detail, my mouth clogs up with bile and sickness. Even thinking about what Steve did to himself makes me want to die. I can think of what I saw next with ease. Gina’s bloodstained face. Bob’s tearful eyes. The toothy grin on Don’s face. The way my hands shook as it was happening. And then, what happened next.
When Steven was dead, Don approached me. A marble was in his hands. I tried to run, but my legs were too terrified to move. I was like a deer in the headlights. I was going to die and it was going to be painful. He pinched my mouth open, blood oozing onto his hand. The marble went into my mouth. He was laughing as it tumbled down into my stomach. I was quivering with terror. I turned towards my two remaining friends, both terrified and unable to move. I waited for my death to come.
But it didn’t. Don was confused. So was I. So were my friends. Confusion allowed us to move with a level of ease we didn’t have before. I leaped at Don and punched three of his teeth out of his smug mouth. I kept punching and punching. He tried to aim his gun at me, but Gina broke his hand clean off with a single punch, a puddle of blood spurting out of the stump where it once lay. Bob was content with breaking legs. When I was done, his face didn’t look like a face anymore. It looked like a cacophony of butterflies was bursting out of the stump of a neck. We were shaking. We were crying. We held each other close for five whole minutes.
It was still dark and the plan could still go ahead. But first, we took Steve out of the room. He was dead and a rat, but we wouldn’t leave him there. He deserved better than that. We left him near the entrance. There was no one in the area for miles, probably by Don’s design. I smoked a cigarette as we loaded the first load of loot into the car. Gina was standing next to me, looking at the full moon with a quiet melancholy. She was humming to herself a song I had never heard before or since. She placed her hand in mine without really thinking. Bob approached us without saying a word. He then sang to the hums. I don’t remember the words precisely, but they were sweet words. Made the whole night seem more barrable.
When we got all the loot out of the mansion, we burned the place down. We paid a small fortune for Steve’s grave. And then, we didn’t speak to one another for a couple years.
---
Three weeks ago, Bob called. He said he wanted to meet up with me and Gina at Steve’s. We weren’t available to meet up until yesterday, which was fine for him. I was the first to arrive. The sun was starting to set on that cool winter afternoon. Snow was falling gracefully upon the graves around me. I saw a family of three stand before the grave in ritualistic sadness. I’d seen them before somewhere, but where I do not know. That’s life, I suppose. You see so many strangers that their stories all blend together into the tapestry of the world. You can’t hold everyone else’s stories in your head. I can barely hold to my own.
Gina arrived next. She was wearing a black winter coat with white fur around the top. The years had done little to change how she looked. She still had those angry, loving eyes. That bushy brown hair, now done up in an afro. And she could probably kick my ass if she wanted to. Instead, she gave me a hug and we started talking. She spent the past couple of years traveling. She has a house on Mars, on the opposite side of the city from where the bar where this all started was. I told her the place got torn down due to structural weaknesses. Now it’s just a lot. She was surprisingly sadden about that. She asks what I did for the past couple of years.
Before I can answer Bob shows up. I was taller than him now, so he introduced himself by saying “So I guess I’m Shorty? heh.” Though, again, the height difference is still not by much. Maybe half an inch. I guess it just meant a lot to him for someone to be Shorty. I can see a gigantic smile through his newly bushy beard. The rest of his hair has started to fall out. Not gracefully though. More patchy and haphazard like a kid whose gotten his hands on an electric clipper. Bob hugs me the way a brother would hug the prodigal son. He says he settled down since we last saw him. Got married to a nice pair of people, one lady, one enby (is that how it’s spelt? I’ve not seen it spelt anywhere). They have a daughter who’s about to enter elementary school. He doesn’t say any of their names quite yet. He waits until we’re done to talk about them further and asked me not to say their names here.
Bob looks to me and asks with a wry smile, “So what’ve you been up to, Ryan?”
“He was just about to tell me before you showed up,” Gina adds, now more curious than before. Her hands rub the back of her neck with excitement. I don’t tell them the full story. I don’t bring up my love affair that ended poorly or the time I had to run out of a burning building or even the dog I accidentally adopted.
Instead, I say, “Well, I’ve gotten out of the business. Almost too late, actually. The day after I left Mars, a war broke out between Lucifer and the Angels. Lucifer lost in the end, which I suppose is fitting. I moved to Venus for a couple of years. Met some people, did some jobs, fell in love. That sort of thing. Eventually, I became homesick. I missed Mars. The way the streets of the city twisted into nooks and crannies that had stores you would never see again. I missed the taste of the air, how it danced on my tongue and made love to my nostrils. I missed the people. Sure, I didn’t always have many interactions with them, but the feel of strangers on Mars is far less alienating than on Venus. So I moved back. The dust had long settled and the people were living their lives to the best of their abilities. No new syndicate had arisen from the ashes. The government was in shambles. The ISSP had deemed the world a lost cause. But there were still people there. Living their lives, helping each other out. It was a strange world. And I wanted to keep it that way. So I spent the rest of the years helping out wherever I could. Got paid for it, though I still had the money from…” We all know what I was about to say, but I don’t say it. “I bought a house in the City, three blocks from the old bar.”
“What happened to it,” asks Bob.
“It closed,” replied Gina curtly. “Structural issues.”
“Shame,” Bob looked at his feet when he said this. We were silent for a minute or two. Then I opened my big mouth.
“So why’d you want to see us after all this time?” Bob looked at me with a quiet resignation.
“They found Don Jacobs’ body.” All the air had been sucked out of us. Gina turned white. I began to sweat. Bob looked sad. “I don’t think they can tie us to him,” Bob says in a futile attempt to relieve us of our anxieties, “it’s too burnt up, too old. I don’t think they’d arrest us either. Too much time has passed for them to care. But…”
“But there’s a chance they do care,” Gina says softly.
“Yeah.” The wind blows silently. Its chill hits my clean shaven face like a thousand tiny daggers. I’m the one who suggests we go back. Back to where the body was left behind. It was nighttime by the time we arrived. There was no moon to light our way. What remains of the investigators have long disappeared. Three weeks does that, I suppose. There’s some tape billowing on a tree, but that’s it. The body’s gone, no doubt taken to some morgue or lab to be analyzed. Don’s family’s dead, so there’s no one who’s gonna pay for the funeral. All that remains of his legacy are statistics in history books. Maybe not even that. All that remains of the mansion after the fire are ruins. The vague outline that, once upon a time, a mansion stood tall. And for twelve years, no one cared that it was gone.
Even without walls, we remember the way to where Steve died. He was a good kid whose sole flaw was being a rat. I never did know who he ratted us out to at the time. Who he was aligned with. Bob would later say he worked for the Angels, which I suppose is better than the ISSP. In retrospect, I probably should have aligned with the Angels as well. But my home was in Lucifer territory and I was too proud to move. Gina wasn’t on either side of that debacle and Bob burnt his bridges shortly after Don turned on him.
We found the room, no longer locked, not even a door. The stain of James’ skin was still etched onto the ground like a tattoo for Mars. Nothing else remained. The marbles had been long lost to the seas of some distant shore out in the stars. Gina saw to that. Pluto, she says. That’s where she left them. No goes to Pluto. It’s a dead world with no prospects. I hope she’s right. We stand in there like idiots thinking that our presence will bring about some ghost, some lost thing that will make us whole. All it brings back are bad memories.
Though something does catch my eye. Right next to me, right where Steve died, lies a butterfly that doesn’t exist. It rests on that spot like a raven on a mantlepiece. I think about that night, the night of the cacophony of butterflies, and it reminds me of a dream I had once. I was walking down a corridor looking for my sister. Never had a sister or any siblings for that matter. She says, “Come on Joe, the circus is about to start.” I follow her with a smile. But when I reach the end of the corridor, she’s gone and there’s no circus to be seen. Just a room full of bodies nailed to walls like butterflies in a glass box. I see myself among the bodies, though I don’t recognize myself in the dream. I wake up before I find out what I do next.
“He deserved better than this,” I said with a sigh.
“No one deserves anything,” quotes Gina wistfully.
“But he should have had better,” replies Bob mournfully. We nod in agreement.
The stars above us dance their incomprehensible dance as we leave that broken place behind and return to the city.
Take care of yourself.
You've earned some rest.
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